


when the world opens up

by jeien



Category: Sound Horizon
Genre: Gen, Moira album spoilers, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-24 06:03:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9706325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeien/pseuds/jeien
Summary: By the time he actually sat down to pick up one of those novels, more than a few dozen centuries had passed—and, by sheer luck or an instance of capricious divine intervention, he wound up being the personal companion to a German prince.





	

**Author's Note:**

> For my darling Kizu. Happy Valentine's Day. Your gift is still way better than mine lol.

The first thing Elef did after the battle of Nechromachia was learn how to be literate. Thanks to the goddess’s punishment, he would never step into any realms that branched outside of Hades—not Tartarus, not Abyss, not Elysion. It was to place his loved ones a world away, out of his reach. It meant he could never die, even with Death’s power still coursing through his veins. Thanatos didn’t know what to do with him either. _I need no assistance as of yet_ , he said. _But when a time comes should I require your service, I will fetch you. For now, you are free to do as you wish._

There was once a time where freedom was something he yearned for. As he stepped into the surface of the living world, by himself, he felt the mocking smile of the goddess as she sat on her throne.

So he taught himself how to read and write, in as many languages as he could come across. He had nothing better to do. Literacy was a mark of power, of ability—as strong as any blade and as sturdy as any shield, used by those capable of rending or restoring the world. He learned the crests and troughs of Greek, the continuous winds of Farsi and Arabic, the curves and curls of Latin, and even a little bit of the bunched strokes of Chinese thanks to a traveling merchant group. The tones and textures of words and phrases slowly mixed with his native tongue, like mixing metal to bring forth something new to add to his arsenal. It was like the secrets of the world suddenly opened up to him, giving him opportunities to study things like government, politics, business, accounting, history. _If only I had this before_ , he thought as he balanced books for a dying empire. _Perhaps things could have been different_.

He learned more as the world evolved around him: languages being born and dying as wars ebbed and flowed into the pages of history time and again, bringing the destruction of one nation while the other prospered. Soon enough, stories meant solely for entertainment were being recorded and disseminated for those who can understand them. By the time he actually sat down to pick up one of those novels, more than a few dozen centuries had passed—and, by sheer luck or an instance of capricious divine intervention, he wound up being the personal companion to a German prince.

“What’s this?” Elef asked, opening the cover of a book that was left haphazardly on the low table. He found that the Roman alphabet strung together at the top of the margins spelled his name.

Prince Albrecht Terell von der Stolzenberg—or Tettere, as he insisted on being called; and yes, the story of how he got the nickname from his grandfather was equally strange as the name itself—sat behind his desk, filling out some paperwork on budgeting for the army. He looked up to see what Elef had in his hands and smiled. “Oh, that? It’s supposedly a tale from your homeland. They recently translated it into German. Now that I think about it, isn’t that the man you were named after?”

 _Oh, right_. He told Tettere before that his late parents named him and his sister after the twins from an ancient legend. It’s not like he went by ‘Elefseus’ anyway. It was a name meant for royalty and he didn’t want any part of that lineage. “Yes, it is,” Elef said. He only read his late master’s magnum opus once, a week before the Library of Alexandria had burned to the ground. His eyes scanned the columns and lines of poetry: the left-hand page with the original Greek text and the right-hand page with the translation. His face scrunched up. “This is terrible.”

“Well, I don’t expect everyone to receive poetry the same way,” Tettere said, absentmindedly weaving the stem of his dip pen between his fingers. “Although if you think it’s terrible, I’m sure you must be disappointed that this was your namesake—”

“I meant the translation,” Elef said, interrupting the prince’s bemused words. “It’s _abysmal_. The grammar doesn’t match up so the tenses are all over the place, the phrasing choices are poor and don’t give the same weight to the sentences, they spelled a lot of the names wrong, and it’s just generally hard to follow. They probably translated from the Latin version—now that I look at it, the sentence structure makes a lot more sense if that’s the case—but kept the original text as a decoration.” Which was _infuriating_ , because his late master’s work should be treated with more respect than whatever chimerical disaster rested in his hands.

The pen fell to the desk with a soft clatter. Elef looked up to meet the prince’s wonderstruck gaze.

“You never fail to surprise me,” Tettere said. He set the pen and his paperwork aside, full attention on Elef. “In the few months you’ve been in this kingdom, you’ve already spearheaded a flood evacuation for one of our largest villages, bested our strongest generals, drafted a short-term and long-term budget for the kingdom, mediated between five foreign diplomats in their own languages, managed to quell a potential civil uprising, and thwarted an attempt on my life. All of which, you claim, were by accident.” Well, the diplomat incident _had_ been an accident. He had not been in his usual cloak and tunic when they came up to him, asking for directions to the conference hall—they probably thought he was castle staff. “And now you demonstrate a deep knowledge in literature? What _can’t_ you do, Elef?”

“Dance, probably.” He put the leather-bound book back on the low table, pushing it over to the far end.  

Tettere chuckled, picking up his writing utensils once more. He looked back down at his paperwork and began to allocate funds to their proper places when he suggested, “You know, if it bothers you so much, perhaps you should just translate it yourself. I haven’t gotten around to reading it, so I would love to read your version first.”

They let the rhythmic duet of nib-on-parchment and the occasional crinkling take over as they fell into silence. Elef leaned back against the settee.

“I suppose I could.”  

\--

 _I hear the voices of the heavens sing—_  
_All six sisters’ melodies ring_  
_True to the tale of one boy turned man_  
_And how his journey against Destiny began._

 _O Moira, I beseech thee!_  
_Already, my end do I see_  
_In that distant horizon, where wings of rebellion fly_  
_Until he reaches the rays of your capricious sky._

 _O Harmonias, sing to me thy songs of heroes gone,_  
_Sing to me thy songs of heroes here and yon,_  
_Sing to me of one such man—the boy whose wings I freed,_  
_Sing to me of my young pupil, before my life recedes!_

 _For when the day comes when darkness devours the sun,_  
_My Elefseus will fight, and my life’s thread fully spun._

\--

If anyone asked thereafter why he spent so much of his free time in the library, meticulously translating an old and almost-forgotten work of poetry, Elef would say that the prince personally requested it. They would nod their heads understandingly because it’s only natural that one would bring forth their best effort for the crown prince. Sometimes Elef would half-jokingly say that he was rectifying a grievous cultural injustice committed against his homeland. The soldiers who had caught him with nib and book in hand after the morning drills would laugh and let him struggle with the usage of this-word or that-word, separate the line there or there, and _No, because that won’t adhere to form_ and then he’d have to change _everything_.

“O Harmonia,” Elef groaned in his native tongue as he pulled his hair back, quickly tying it into a thick tail, “sing to me the song you sang to my late master. Preferably in German.” The sisters failed to descend from the skies. It was worth the try, he supposed.

The leather on the spine was cracked and well-worn, its pages are notes upon annotations upon ink stains of German and Latin between the printed lines and Greek frustrations at the top margins. The side of his hand practically bleeds black now. Still, despite everything, the left-hand side of the book was pristine and untouched.

He yawned.

Gods, it felt like ages since he last did such a human action.

Elef set aside the nib pen and the ink well. He flipped back to the first page of poetry and began to read only the left-hand pages.

\--

 _If you compare the eternity_  
_That belongs to the Gods,_  
_The human is momentary_  
_And equally flawed._

\--

When he had still been a child, he had forced himself into a constant cycle of undoing the threads of suffering that the goddess had spun. He cried and bled and writhed and kept only one hope in his heart: to reunite with his sister so they can both return to the house in the mountains where their parents were. And when that hope was finally snuffed out, he decided to bury it completely.

The memories he thought he left behind in the ocean tides surged and crashed to his mind’s forefront with every crest and trough of black ink on paper. The scenic mountains of Arcadia where he tasted a bit of Elysion on earth, the wagon ride to the slave market as dark as a womb ready to birth to disposable laborers, the escape from Ilion with Orion as he took his first life, the years he spent searching for his sister amidst the rolling waves and winds, the reunion with his sister’s corpse and their final farewell as she descended into Hades, the acceptance of Thanatos’s power and the liberation of the slaves, the siege his slave army placed Ilion under and his battle with Prince Leontius, the bloodbath that ensued as all his immediate kin were slain by his hand, his march towards the gates of Hades and the beginning of Nechromachia: Elef relived every moment he sought to erase.

 _Master, you worry too much_ , Elef thought as he let the last lines taper off. If that was how Milos had told his story—if he had somehow found beauty and dignity in the way Elef lived his life—then Elef supposed he had nothing to be ashamed of, to be afraid of.

Nothing worth forgetting.

\--

_‘Moira, is this the world that you wished for—?!’_

\--

“It’s a shame the story ends so suddenly,” Tettere sighed. Elef gave him the finished product—several sheaves of parchment sewn together by hand with twine, full of handwritten translations and annotations at the foot of each page—two months after they first discussed it. Tettere had been away on sojourn within the neighboring kingdoms to scope out alliance prospects; so when he came home to discover the package atop his vanity, he immediately began to read. “Now I’ll forever wonder whether Elefseus reigned victorious over Fate.”

They were in his office again. Tettere was drafting treaties. Elef was skimming through philosophical treatises. Their duet now consisted of nib-on-paper and pages turned.

“Shall I tell you something?” he asked, not looking up from his book.

“Does it have to do with the ending?”

“He lost.”

The scratches of the pen ceased. “He lost?”

“Thanatos’s power coupled with Elefseus’s strength wasn’t enough,” Elef said, turning to the next page. “After all, Moira is the Mother of All Things. She let the battle draw out as long as it remained amusing to her before she decided she had enough. It ended swiftly afterwards and Elefseus was punished for his treason.”

“What was his punishment?” Tettere asked.

Elef fell silent. He closed the book and set it on his lap, effectively finishing their paltry duet. His head fell back and his eyes were drawn to the ceiling. “Immortality.”  

“It _does_ seem like such an inconvenient sentence,” Tettere said, resting his chin on his palm. “Of course, that’s just my opinion and you’re aware of how apparently outlandish it is. I can’t help but love those who’ve already passed on. But you know, the majority of people would be quite envious to have such a punishment.”

“The afterlife is an important thing—and as complex as the kingdom you govern. For warriors, it is a place of rest, of reward. It is where you reunite with the people you’ve lost.” Elef closed his eyes. He let his mind imagine what he could never have. He could never join them in their eternal resting place, so Elef had to be content with only knowing that they were there. “He will never be able to see his loved ones again. Should he find companions throughout the years he lives, they will eventually pass on. He is destined to walk the world for as long as it exists, even when the only thing he yearns for is death.”

Tettere stared at him. The treaties could wait. Anything could wait. Everything seemed so permanent compared to Elef, who looked as if he could be gone in the next breath. “You know so much. How do you know all this?”

There was no response.

“This little addendum of yours, about the ending—is it less of an explanation and more of a confession?”

Nothing still.

“Are you the ancient hero, Elefseus?”

“Not anymore,” Elef finally said. “I am Elef now. I _have_ been Elef, ever since that day thousands of years ago.”

“How interesting,” Tettere said, his signature half-lidded smile blooming on his face. Elef snorts and mutters a faint _You would_ _find this interesting, wouldn’t you?_ “Well, my revered hero, this does explain many things. But I do not like being deceived for such an extended period of time, especially when it comes to handsome foreigners that appear from seemingly nowhere.” The prince picks up his nib pen once more and resumes with his treaties. “I expect you to tell me the whole, unadulterated truth about yourself when we have the time.”

Elef opened one eye. “That could take ages.”

“You have an eternity and I have my entire life,” Tettere said, restarting their usual duet. “I don’t mind. So please, do stay in the kingdom. I’d be honored to be your companion for however long it lasts.”

“You just want me around because I’m technically part of Death itself.”

A laugh flutters out of Tettere’s lips—another melody he hopes to add to their growing symphony. “I admit that it’s quite appealing.” He draws out the curves and swirls and straight edges of terms and negotiations on the parchment. Tettere chances a glance at Elef, seeing the curves of lean muscle and the swirls of his cascading hair and straight edges of a man who has seen far too much. He wants to know more about that man. “Really, though, it’s mostly because it would be lonely without you. You’ve become quite the staple here.”

“Have I?”

“For a man supposedly meant to wander the world alone, I would say yes.” Tettere dabs the nib in the ink well. “So while I’m drafting this treaty to send to my father, tell me about what happened after you received your punishment.”

He gave a noncommittal hum. “I suppose I could.”


End file.
